I’m new here, so apologies if I’m doing something wrong.
I currently find myself unwilling to spend my time at Stack Exchange curating data for the benefit of a profit-driven private company.
Codidact seems to be an upcoming plausible alternative… I’m skeptical it will work for multiple reasons. However, the chess community created https://lichess.org/ and it’s excellent (better, in my opinion, than the non-free sites). So that’s proof of concept right there. So maybe.
Anyway, my question…
Is the plan to reproduce each and every Stack Exchange site?
Some sites, like Stack Overflow, are ludicrously large and therefore dysfunctional, even with large community support. For smaller sites, it’s going to be very hard to attract even a single user who has a clue how to use the site.
Some of the site boundaries might be better off changed. E.g. perhaps there is some benefit in combining Writing with Literature (“Reading and Writing”).
There are sites that are too large (StackOverflow) or too small (some of the recent Area 51 graduates and some others). Too large and it will be hard to manage - but some may get split and move here anyway. Too small and without the benefit of Google-ness, it will be hard to get a vibrant site with just ‘x’ % of a site’s users moving over.
The most likely sites to move first will be ones where the existing/former moderators or key top users have already expressed interest. Some sites have core groups of people both asking & answering - those sites will have more traction to get started than sites where most of the questions come from random people who ask one question and (mostly) never show up again.
While I expect that most of the initial communities will be direct transplants from SE, over time I would hope Codidact will evolve in a more useful manner.
A necessary precondition for a Codidact site is a group of people who want to build it. We’re not just going to import all the SE sites and wait for people to come; that’d be no better than the clone sites already out there.
Our first sites, as @manassehkatz said, will likely be the ones whose users and mods/ex-mods are here building the Codidact platform. I hope that word will spread and other communities will join us too. By the time we launch we’ll need to have put together some sort of process for adding communities.
I think it will be like Stack Exchange when it started. First there will only be a few sites, then it will grow as more people join. The “Area 51” process of SE is pretty sound - in order to launch a new site, there must already be enough of a community willing to participate & moderate. You can’t launch sites just for the sake of it.
The thing with community-driven development is that it can become whatever we want it to be. As long as there is enough interest and active users, there’s no limit to how many sites there will be.